thought-provoking

insights

From the Maximus Team

Feature Article

The phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, coined last century by then management guru Peter Drucker, has never seemed more pertinent than it is today.

The Royal Commission into misconduct in the financial sector has highlighted cultural issues as foundational and fundamental driver of the behaviours it investigated. As a result, many Australian organisations are revising their approach to strategy while scrambling to reshape teams, cultures and behaviour and relearn the new rules of survival.

This white paper examines the new perspective of culture as an adaptable and evolving organism and the relationship between culture and strategy in the age of disruption. Maximus address the criticality of getting culture right and the role the leader plays as cultural curator, outlining how they can navigate their new responsibility without controlling it.

If you and your business stand still, neither will survive. The only way to keep up is to have an enterprise mindset. Leaders with an enterprise mindset treat their organisations’ functions, geographies and systems as interconnected and interdependent parts of a cohesive structure with one goal: delivering what their customers want

Recently I attended Singularity University (SU), a Silicon Valley think-tank. SU educates and inspires business leaders from all over the world to look for break-through solutions to humanity’s grand challenges, such as hunger and poverty. SU argues that only the corporate world has the physical and intellectual capacity to offer sustainable solutions to these problems…

In 1859, a keen hunter released 24 imported rabbits into the Australian bush, where none had roamed before. Ten years later, Australia’s wild rabbit population was in the millions and by 1920, there were 10 billion.

Over recent years wellbeing has attracted increasing attention and investment. This has been driven by several factors including societal attention on mental health and the growing understanding that organisations have a duty to improve health and wellbeing, not just mitigate risks.

Simultaneously, trends such as an increasingly global and competitive market, ageing population and rapidly changing technology, provide great opportunities to the way we work, but also significant threats to our wellbeing.

Algorithms are replacing relationships and instinct in talent management, but not every CEO likes the idea of using digital tools to make people decisions. Of all the decisions a CEO makes, ensuring the right people are successfully recruited, retained and rewarded has the most impact on business growth. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder to find those people.

Many Millennials are rejecting a linear career path in favour of building a portfolio of consulting, freelancing, contracting, entrepreneurial and in-house employment experience. This opens the door for CEOs and HR directors to move towards a portfolio approach to employment that is a better fit for the dynamic modern marketplace than the traditional employer-as-owner model.